Blasted thing almost killed me

…A cold in real-life and a ravager in-game >.<

So…remember that cold that I was talking about oh…30 days ago? I’m still dealing with the after-affects. It sure was a doozy, making me miss a day and a half of school, not to mention I couldn’t sleep properly for a week. I was tired and grumpy and coughing and generally not a fun person to be around. I think Mr. Paladin and my brother annoyed with me coughing up my lungs 24/7. Heck, I didn’t even like myself then. It got to the point where taking 2 Advil Cold & Sinus and Buckley’s just wasn’t cutting it. If I was working or going to school, I was trying to sleep.

Luckily it went away on its own after a while. Surprisingly, I’m still coughing every once in a while but it’s nothing more than a mild annoyance. What is unlucky however is that when the cold was at its worst, I had a huge project coming due. So…I had to spend 3 days staying 4-5 hours after school trying to get it done on time. Since I already spend 7 hours in school…that adds up to 11-12 hours spent sitting in the classroom for 3 days. My prof gave me an extension and I just barely got it in on time but I was soooooo relieved to have it done.

However, all of this meant that I barely touched WoW for 2 weeks. Xion and Bursthoof were worried that I had fallen off the face of the earth. This did lead me to discover that…I didn’t really need WoW. Sure, it would have been nice to play it but I wasn’t freaking out over it.

This doesn’t mean that I’m going to quit, oh no. It just made it obvious that I’m not addicted to the game. I can go without it for a while and not go insane. In fact, WoW has kind of gone on the side burner as I was really aching for some good roleplaying so I pulled out Neverwinter Nights 2 again. Now, WoW has the advantage of being more open-ended and more hack-and-slash. You have complete control over your character and what they do. In NWN, the fighting is more automatic. Your character automatically performs certain abilities and starts attacking a nearby hostile once they’ve finished off the original target. Throw your character into the middle of a battle and you don’t have to do anything for a couple minutes if you don’t want to. There’s also a more linear, in-depth story progression. You follow the story line from beginning to end and when you kill someone, they stay dead. 😛 The roleplaying is also unparalleled IMO. I just love being able to immerse myself in the story lines. It really fires up my imagination and makes me dream up my own stories. WoW just doesn’t have that impact. All in all, these two games serve two different sets of my entertainment needs. If I was locked in a room with a computer that had only these two games installed, I could live happily ever after.

NWN’s aside, only Khaja has been receiving any attention in WoW. On a whim, I decided to tame a ravager specimen for her. I’ve been to Azuremyst so many times now that I don’t even need to consult my own directions any more. Once I arrived there, I thought it would be prudent to first tame an enraged ravager to get Gore 3. Keep in mind that at this point, Khaja is level 28 and the enraged ravagers are levels 16-17. Those green buggers are bloody hard to tame! Slumber Sand or Magic Dust are almost required to tame one of those. My first attempt I simply used Tame Beast from a reasonable distance away. Then the swipe attack knocked me down and I was going to attempt to try it again but I didn’t have enough mana and hit points were getting scarce. Silly me forgot about rez sickness. >.< I ran away, waited for it wear off, then tried again. I get knocked down yet again and when I try a second time to Tame Beast, another swipe makes me hit the dirt. I must have tried 5 more times with varying tactics before I succeeded. What finally worked was: going into Aspect of the Monkey, setting down a frost trap at max ranged distance from the little bugger, letting off a Concussive Shot and then immediately beginning Tame Beast. After the trap wore off, he still tried to swipe at me but I was lucky enough to dodge him and complete the tame. After all of that, learning Gore 3 from him and grabbing a ravager specimen was a piece of cake. Why did I not just stick with the enraged ravager? Because the ravager specimens match Khaja’s hair better >.>

From level 10, Khaja was able to level the ravager up to 21 by killing stormhides in the Barrens (skinning FTW) and later lots of harpies and miscellaneous enemies in Stonetalon. It only took me maybe two or three hours, with detours and chatting with people on MSN at the same time. Not too bad, and he’s already begun stealing aggro away from Khaja and holding his own.

Hmm, the above comment didn’t seem to post fully… it cut off part of my comment! 😛 Anyways really all that I had left to say after the bit about the cold, was that I think I’m an addict. I went without WoW for a week once (because I had no computer access) and it was killing me 😛

Oh, I may not be addicted to WoW but I sure am addicted to my computer and the Internet. I once had to get my computer fixed and was without computer access for 3 days. I had to read through 3 novels just to keep myself from dying from boredom.